WALUBENGO: Use electronic results transmission in Makueni poll

The move by Safaricom to pull out as a partner to IEBC in providing the infrastructure to electronically relay results for the Makueni Senate by election drew little reaction. 

No reaction from the political parties and none from the technical and legal communities as well.

Does it mean the Results Transmission System (RTS) that was so successfully used in the 2010 referendum and the subsequent by-elections is no longer useful?

Did the Supreme Court ruling diminish the value and push for IEBC to automate the electoral processes - when it legally confirmed and validated the manually processed presidential results?

Has a precedent been set and IEBC can now rest assured that as long as it can prove that its manual election processes are transparent, accurate, verifiable and secure - then it is as good as done?  After all the Supreme Court did declare or at least imply that the electronic aspects are cosmetic, good to have, but not necessary to deliver a credible election.

There are several stages in our electoral process that automation can play a critical though not legally binding role. From the voter registration and verification, through the actual voting, tallying and subsequent results transmission.  In the 2013 General Election, the IEBC spent billions of shillings in automating all the above stages - except for the actual voting process which is to be automated.

The BVR (Biometric Voter Registration) equipment is what most Kenyans used to register and during the voting stage, the EVID (Electronic Voter Identifier) was expected to verify that indeed the individual voting is the same one who registered - thus reducing the risk of having ghost or dead voters.

After being identified by the EVID, the voter would manually cast the vote and at the end of the voting period, the polling clerks and the political party agents would participate in the tallying process.

IEBC had deployed an elaborate results transmission system (RTS) that would then enable the Returning Officers to immediately send the tallied results electronically in form of an SMS to the IEBC central servers.

These incoming electronic results, that would be randomly received from thousands of polling stations would be displayed in real-time across the country.  Without the mobile telecoms operator (e.g. Safaricom) infrastructure, this part of the election process would not be possible.

But just how critical and significant is this results transmission system in our electoral processes? A simple observation shows that in all cases where IEBC has used the electronic results transmission system, the losing party has had no reason to raise a petition against the declared results. It means that the politicians, more than the electoral, legal or  technical communities have quickly appreciated the power and impact of the RTS in clamping down on electoral fraud.

The instantaneous as well as  the random and public nature of the electronically transmitted results, leaves little room for electoral mischief. This is because the RTS puts the election results process out of control of any single agent or agency - the process is instead at the mercy of thousands of polling agents acting randomly and independently of each other in real-time.  At this point, the electoral process is in a self-propelling mode and according to the Kriegler Report, it can eliminate more than 95 per cent of the typical electoral fraud cases.

The politicians know this and that is why they are currently not complaining when they read that IEBC will not be offering the RTS again. It is obvious that both leading political parties in the Makueni Senate race are unable to resist the temptation to exploit whatever fraudulent opportunities that often accompany the manual results transmission system.

But as citizens of this country, who employ and pay IEBC to do their work, we must raise the bar and demand that IEBC must move beyond just delivering "legally" credible elections. They must also deliberately reduce opportunities for electoral mischief by embracing and deploying electronic methods in their process. 

After all, we have already incurred the exorbitant cost of procuring these gadgets - their job is simply to ensure they are put to use as expected.